


More Than the Stars (Over Your Head)

by bloodofpyke



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:28:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodofpyke/pseuds/bloodofpyke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He waits an extra beat before shutting the door and going to check on Kamilah, hovering in the doorway of her room and whispering, “G’night, Mahiya, sleep tight” and then going to bed himself, thinking about skipping heartbeats and hidden suns and, most of all, the glint in Niall’s eyes when he laughs.</i>
</p>
<p>Zayn's a single dad and Niall's the babysitter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Than the Stars (Over Your Head)

It’s easier, afterwards, to remember only the moments after she was born: the way she fit so easily in his grasp, her eyes already open and locked on his; how his heart felt like it was too big, suddenly, for his ribcage; the way her name sounded in his mouth, like something delicate and precious.

  
And it’s easier, too, to bury the memories of the tired conversations about new jobs and new houses and new lives in the way that she had smiled at him for the first time, grasping his finger and kicking her feet; or the way Liam’s eyes crinkled and Harry almost melted into the floor and even the clash and chaos of Louis muted whenever they came over; or, finally, the catch in his chest when she sighed and said  _papa_  for the first time.

+

Zayn doesn’t go back to work until Kamilah is three and tripping over her own feet, singing nonsense songs to him in the mornings while he dashes around their kitchen making tea and pouring cereal. “Papa,” she says one morning, kicking her feet against the legs of the chair and drawing flowers on his lesson plan. “Can you braid my hair like Mummy did the last time?”

  
“Not sure I know how to do that, hon,” Zayn says, slipping the lesson plan away from her crayons and replacing it with a blank sheet of paper. “But I could try, yeah?” he adds when he glances over and sees her lean forward and bat her eyelashes at him in a way that she probably picked up from Harry. And he can practically see Liam, shaking his head and grinning, when he digs his phone out of his bag and looks up videos on youtube, watching them with his eyes narrowed and his glance flickering from his phone to his daughter. “I can do this,” he mutters, mostly to himself, chuckling when Kamilah raises her arms and cheers, the crayons forgotten for the moment.

  
And he does, sort of; braiding her hair into two mostly contained plaits after twenty minutes of her sitting the stillest she’s ever been and him scrolling through different videos to double-check that he’s doing this right. “Are you done  _yet_ , papa?” Kamilah asks after Zayn checks his phone for the sixth time, twisting her head around to try and look and patting her hair with her hands. “Can I see, can I see?”

  
“Course you can,” Zayn tells her, picking her up and walking her into his bedroom with her arms wrapped round his neck. He sits her on his dresser and tilts the mirror so she can see, laughing when she shakes her head and scrunches her nose before tilting her head up to look at him.

  
“Mummy did it better,” Kamilah says, adding, “but I like this  _even_  more” when Zayn mock pouts at her, dissolving into giggles when he leans forward and tickles her ribs.

  
“Alright, time for school, Mahiya, let’s go,” Zayn tells her, swinging her off the dresser and walking her back to the kitchen.

  
“What if I don’t want to go, papa?”

  
“You have to,” he says. “How else will you show off your new braids? I bet all the kids will ask me to do their hair next, and  _then_  you’ll be sorry you ever said Mummy did it better.”

  
“They won’t,” she says calmly. “Brittany’s mummy is better than  _my_  mummy, even, and I bet Lizzy wouldn’t want you doing her hair.”

  
“Not even Lizzy?” Zayn asks, helping her get her backpack on and making sure it’s zipped up and that the little teddy bear he got her for naptime is inside.

  
“Not even Lizzy,” she repeats, eyes big and round. She holds his hand for the first block of so before letting go and skipping ahead a few feet and running back with flushed cheeks and her braids half falling out and a leaf or rock in her hands. She fidgets a bit when they get to the primary school, waiting while he slides the rocks and leaves into his bag without crumpling them and turns her around to straighten her braids as best he can. “You’re coming to pick me up, right papa?” she asks, the same way she does every morning when he drops her off.

  
“I’ll be here early,” Zayn promises, kissing the top of her hair. “So if you miss me, you can just look out the window and I’ll be right here.”

  
“Cross your heart?”

  
“Cross my heart.”

+

  
  
It starts out slowly, at first, the campaign to get Zayn an afternoon sitter: Liam popping round after work, clutching a carton of take-away and a Disney movie, pulling Kamilah onto his lap and asking Zayn about that Lit Theory class he’d wanted to teach; or Harry bursting in weekend mornings with groceries, stepping over the toys strewn about to set up shop in Zayn’s kitchen, mumbling about take-away sickness and making pointed remarks about extra hands and healthy leftovers; or Louis, moaning that Zayn never leaves his flat anymore and pointing out that even  _his_  sisters had had a sitter and they’d all turned out fine.

  
And Zayn always shakes his head, pretending to think about it for half a moment before saying that no, he doesn’t think it would work out, he doesn’t want to hire someone to stand in for him, that they’re coping just fine, thank you.

  
But it works, somehow, the persistence and powerpoint of charts and research that Liam and Louis had pulled together, paying off until Zayn’s actually thinking about it and no longer just pretending.

  
“I could, y’know, put up a sign at uni?” he says to Liam one night, sprawled across his couch with a stack of essays on his chest and Liam’s hands resting on his knees. “Might be helpful, yeah?”

  
Liam glances at him for a second, patting his knee and grinning. “Best not tell Harry and Lou straight away, though, or Louis will have you out at the pubs before you’ve even printed off the flyer and Harry will stop cooking you dinners straight away,” he says after a moment, turning back to the movie he’d put on, something ostensibly for Kamilah, but Zayn knew better; knew  _Liam_  better.

  
“Cheers, mate,” Zayn muttered, scrawling a half-legible comment about the idea of embracing duality under a quote pulled from  _Demian_  and adding an exclamation point after the grade.

+

The flyer goes up within the week, tucked underneath a call for a tutor for the Shakespearean sonnet class on the English department bulletin board, and Zayn wonders if he’s doing the right thing, trying to picture someone else picking Kamilah up from primary school and fixing her afternoon snack and it feels  _off_ , somehow, but he leaves the flyer up in the end.

+

“Any luck yet?” Harry asks him one evening, his elbows on the table and his hair mussed like he’s just woken up from a nap.

  
Zayn shrugs, knocking his spoon against the side of the bowl and splattering soup on his jumper. “Got one last interview tomorrow after my first class,” he says, adding “ta, mate,” when Harry tosses him a napkin.

  
“And?” Harry prompts. “Any good?”

  
“Dunno yet, guess I’ll just have to wait and see. But hey, Haz?”

  
“Yeah?”

  
“Sitter or no, you’re not off the hook for the food, Kamilah’s really gotten used to your cookies and that cake thing you baked last week. She’ll cry and everything if you stop, I bet.”

  
“Bake your own cakes, you tosser,” Harry answers, tilting his chair back and laughing, the toe of his boot catching Zayn’s shin.

+

He wakes up to a text message from Liam and spends a good five minutes trying to decode it while Kamilah climbs onto the bed next to him, tugging at the hem of his shirt. “Papa?” she asks sleepily, abandoning his shirt to rub at her eyes, her head falling against his arm while he tries to type out a response to Liam (“gud luck 2day wt the last interview m8 let me noe how it goes,” Liam had sent him, and Zayn taps out a simple “thanks, li. starting to warm up to the idea. come over for dinner tonight?” before setting his phone down).

  
“C’mon sleepyhead, time for breakfast,” Zayn says. Kamilah doesn’t answer, but Zayn can see her eyes fall shut and her breathing slow, and he reaches down and pulls her onto his lap. “What’s wrong, Mahiya? Trouble sleeping last night?” he asks as her eyes flutter open and she twists enough to bury her face in his tshirt.

  
“You’re going  _away_ ,” she mumbles. 

  
“Hey,” he says softly, stroking her hair. “I’m not going anywhere, not without you. Who told you I was going away?”

  
“Uncle Louis said so, I  _heard_  him. He said someone else was going to pick me up from school and stay here until  _dinner_.” 

  
“Ah,” Zayn says, still stroking his daughter’s hair and wondering why he hadn’t waited until she was asleep to listen to Louis’ message the other night. “Listen, Mahiya, I’m not going anywhere, no matter what you heard Uncle Louis say, okay?”

  
“Was he lying? I could put him in time out,” Kamilah says solemnly, tipping her head back to look at him.

  
“I don’t know if Uncle Louis would like being put in time out,” Zayn tells her, smiling a bit before adding in a rush, “he wasn’t lying though, Mahiya.”

  
“But  _Papa_ -”

  
“It’s just. It’s just temporary, someone to help out so I can maybe work a little bit more. But I’ll be home every night in time for dinner and a bedtime story, and I won’t let anyone that you don’t like pick you up from school.”

  
“Cross your heart?” Kamilah asks, twisting the fabric of his shirt around her fingers.

  
“Cross my heart.”

+

He gets two more texts before his first class has even started--one from Louis about arranging a night out at the pub once the sitter situation is sorted, and one from Harry that stretches into three messages about the perfect smoothie with a line about the interview crammed in at the end like he’d forgotten the reason for the text until the last moment--and he responds while half-listening to two of his students talking about a football match from over the weekend.

  
Louis texts him back almost immediately (“ha! told you it was a good idea, you wanker!”), and Zayn can almost  _see_  the self-satisfied grin on Louis’ face, or the way he probably leaned back in his chair, kicking his feet in the air, before sending that text. He gets Harry’s response just before the last student walks into the room (“d’you want me to bring smoothies over tonight, z? don’t want you lot getting scurvy”) and he teaches the lesson with half a grin on his face, still wondering, quietly, somewhere hidden, if he’s making a mistake, bringing a stranger into Kamilah’s life.

+

He lets the class go a few minutes early--no one, he reasons, should have to talk about Hesse for any longer than necessary--but he still makes it to his office a few minutes past ten, and there’s already someone sitting in the chair across from his desk.

  
Someone  _tiny_ , wearing a too-big jumper and fiddling with a baseball hat, a tattered bookbag sitting next to his trainers, and he looks up when Zayn walks in, eyes bluer than Louis’ even, and his smile so bright that it has to be drawn on.

+

It takes a week for Kamilah to get used to Niall--and of course Zayn had hired him, how could he not, when Niall’s CV had more childcare gigs than anyone else he’d interviewed?--but she warms up once Niall sneaks her a bit of a chocolate donut when Zayn’s back is turned.

  
“I like him, papa,” she tells Zayn one night after Niall leaves (and it takes about a week, too, for Louis to stop poking fun at Zayn for doing a week of babysitting test runs, moaning that at this rate they’d never make it out of Zayn’s flat before Kamilah’s sixteenth birthday). 

  
“What do you think of Niall picking you up from school and staying here until dinnertime, then?”

  
“S’fine,” Kamilah says, rearranging Barbie’s hair care salon by Zayn’s feet. “He’s funny.”

  
“Well, then, I guess that’s sorted,” Zayn says, reaching over to grab his phone to call Niall with the news.

+

It’s hard, at first, coming home to Kamilah chattering about the parts of her day that Zayn hadn’t been there for, and Niall sitting on his couch, bright as the sun, wearing worn sweaters that even Harry would have been ashamed to own, and braiding Kamilah’s hair better than Zayn ever could.

  
Niall stays for dinner most nights, giggling at some of Zayn’s jokes until his cheeks are flushed and his eyes shine even brighter, and Kamilah giggles with him, her chin propped up on her hands, and it’s then that Zayn thinks that this isn’t so bad, having someone else to share this with.

  
“Uncle Niall eats a lot,” Kamilah tells Zayn one night, twirling her pasta with her brow furrowed and both hands grasping her bright yellow fork.

  
“Maybe he didn’t eat his veggies when he was little like he was supposed to,” Zayn says, grinning at Niall. “And then he never, ever,  _ever_  grew any, and he’s trying to catch up now.”

  
“Twat,” Niall mutters out the side of his mouth, kicking Zayn under the table.

  
“He can have  _my_  veggies if he wants, papa,” Kamilah says earnestly. “I don’t ever want to grow, so I don’t mind at all.”

  
“Thank you, Mahiya, you’re so much nicer than your grumpy old dad,” Niall says, reaching across the table for Kamilah’s plate and tipping her carrots on top of his pasta, ignoring Zayn’s eye roll.

+

“Mahiya?” Zayn mumbles after dinner, scrawling out a check for Niall, the sound of Kamilah’s  _Spongebob_  DVD floating into the kitchen.

  
“Sorry,” Niall says, his cheeks still a bit red. “Kamilah said you called her that sometimes, that it meant something important? Or, well, she said that it was a big word, not sure she knows what important means. I can, y’know, stop using it if it makes you uncomfortable or anything?”

  
“No, no,” Zayn says, passing Niall the check and trying not to think about the way the word sounded in Niall’s mouth; foreign, almost, like his tongue didn’t quite fit around it, but  _warm_ , like the smell of Harry’s curls and Louis’ jumpers and Liam’s toothpaste all jumbled together, something like home. “It’s fine, you’re good,” Zayn tells him, walking Niall to the door and collapsing on the couch to grade essays with Kamilah and Spongebob and Patrick.

+

“The PTA would disapprove, y’know,” Liam says one afternoon over lunch. 

  
“What?”

  
“Of you. And Niall. They’d shake their heads and frown and everything. Wouldn’t like it one bit.”

  
“Liam,” Zayn starts, his voice measured and slow. “We don’t  _have_  the PTA here. You’re thinking of American. We’ve got, I dunno, concerned parents and watery tea. And anyway,” he adds when Liam shoots him a grin. “There’s nothing to disapprove  _of_. He’s just, y’know, Kamilah’s sitter.”

  
“Right, course,” Liam says, still grinning a bit and letting it slide, not mentioning the red creeping up over Zayn’s collar.

+

Louis shows up at Zayn’s office a few days later, grinning and bouncing on his toes, telling Zayn to call and arrange for Niall to stay later because they were going to the pub tonight, cartoons and essays and family dinners be damned, he needs to  _drink_.

  
Zayn waves him away, already dialing Niall’s number and yelling that he’ll meet them outside the pub after work. 

  
“Sorry, what was that last bit?” Niall asks. “Something about after work? Are you bringing home that fudge again?”

  
“Oh, for Kamilah, you mean?” Zayn smiles. “Sorry, not tonight. I actually wanted to ask if you’d be alright staying a bit later tonight? I’m getting dragged to the pub and believe me, if I could bring Kamilah and let you go home, I would, but--”

  
“Sure, no problem,” Niall says cheerfully. “Just text me when you’re on your way home so I can tell Kamilah to act like I put her to bed at her normal time, yeah?”

  
“Course. And for the record, Kamilah’s bedtime is around eight, and she’ll say she doesn’t need her teddy bear or her night light, but don’t listen to her.”

  
“Eight o’clock, teddy bear, night light. Got it. Have a good night, yeah?” Niall says before hanging up.

+

Zayn gets home scarcely late enough to call it a proper night out; stumbling a bit on the front steps and reaching into his jacket for the pack of cigarettes that isn’t there--he’d given up after Kamilah was born, but sometimes, sometimes, he caught a whiff of smoke and ash on the collars of his jackets, faded and stale, and he had to call Liam until the craving passed.

  
“Zayn?” Niall calls when he opens the front door, and there’s barely half a second before Niall turns the corner, hair mussed and the sleeves of his jumper pushed above his elbows, giggling a bit when he sees Zayn slumped against the front door. “Oh, are you quite pissed, then?”

  
“M’ _not_  pissed,” Zayn tells him. “Just haven’t been out in a while, is all. How was it here? Kamilah go to sleep okay?”

  
“Was gonna say it’s a bit too early to be pissed. And yeah, went to sleep early, even. Think she missed you; she didn’t even try to argue when I handed her the teddy bear and switched on the night light.”

  
“Shut it, you,” Zayn mutters, tugging off his jacket. “Thanks, y’know, for staying late and everything. I’ll give you the day off tomorrow if you want.”

  
“You’re only saying that because you want to skive off work and spend all day tomorrow sleeping and watching DVDs with Kamilah,” Niall teases, pushing his sleeves down and shrugging his jacket on. “But I’ll take it, yeah. See you Friday, then?”

  
“Friday, yeah,” Zayn says, standing in the doorway until Niall melts into a figure so small he could slip him into his pocket. He waits an extra beat before shutting the door and going to check on Kamilah, hovering in the doorway of her room and whispering, “g’night, Mahiya, sleep tight” and then going to bed himself, thinking about skipping heartbeats and hidden suns and, most of all, the glint in Niall’s eyes when he laughs.


End file.
